Caves of Ice, page 18
At length we reached the dead-end passage where Penlan had fallen, revealing the existence of the ambull tunnels below the mine, and we paused to regroup.
‘This is it,’ I warned everyone. ‘From now on our chances of meeting a necron are greatly increased.’ What I meant was ‘practically inevitable,’ but I shied away from pronouncing those words. Not out of deference to the feelings of Welard and his men, who I had no doubt would have responded with the same lack of emotion that they had displayed thus far, but because I didn’t want to face that thought myself. Welard waggled his cheroot, which had by now acquired a thin scum of frost over the tightly-packed tabac leaves it was composed of, and which crunched irritatingly between his teeth as he spoke.
‘We’ll be ready for them.’ He gestured with his left hand. ‘Hastur.’ One of the troopers stepped forward to cover the hole with his hellgun while the rest rappelled down into the darkness with display team precision. I heard a couple of clicks in my comm-bead, almost as if it were picking up some stray interference from somewhere but which I knew was the signal from the advance party confirming that it was all clear down there, and the sergeant grinned at me. For the first time it struck me that he was actually enjoying this. ‘Coming?’ he asked, and disappeared down the hole after his men.
Why I simply didn’t shake my head and run for the surface, intent only on making it to the next shuttle out, I’ll never know. There was still my fraudulent reputation to consider, of course, double-edged weapon though that had become in the last few years, dragging me into these ghastly situations almost as readily as I was able to turn it to my advantage, but even now I found myself reluctant to surrender it. And it couldn’t be denied that my chances of survival would be marginally better with a screen of storm troopers between me and the necrons instead of wandering around these catacombs alone. I glanced round the narrow chamber, steeling myself, and met Jurgen’s eyes. The sight of him was instantly reassuring, despite his usual unprepossessing appearance, a visible (and olfactory) reminder of all the perils we’d faced and bested together. He grinned at me, and hefted the bulk of his melta.
‘After you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ll watch your back.’ A task, I have to say, which he performed admirably throughout our years of service together. I forced a smile to my face.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said, then before I could change my mind I seized the line and slithered down into the bowels of hell.
I landed heavily, but retained my footing, and was able to step aside as Jurgen lurched down the rope behind me. The storm troopers looked mildly disdainful at our performance, the awkwardness of which was underlined a moment later by Hastur’s descent, which he managed with the dexterity of an acrobat.
‘Where to?’ Welard asked.
‘This way.’ I indicated the right direction and waited while the storm troopers went through the gap first, falling into place behind them. With every step we took the knot in my stomach wound itself tighter, the memory of where we were going insinuating itself into my forebrain, inextricably intertwined with images of the massacre I’d witnessed on Interitus Prime. This would be different, I kept telling myself. I wasn’t fleeing in panic through an unknown labyrinth this time, I was heading for a known location, which, by the Emperor’s grace, I had already entered before and escaped to tell the tale. Kasteen was right, the necrons would be concerned entirely with the greenskins, they didn’t even know we were here...
‘Found something,’ the pointman said, snapping me out of my reverie and back to the claustrophobic confines of the ambull run. We closed up, the faint light from our shrouded luminators glinting from some detritus on the tunnel floor.
‘What do you make of that, sir?’ Jurgen asked, his feeble beam picking out something only he had noticed. Apart from myself, he was the only one of our party who had walked these narrow tunnels before, and would be able to notice any changes. The hairs on the back of my neck rose, something that happens in popular fiction far more often than it does in real life, and which I can assure you is a remarkably uncomfortable sensation. My aide was shining his luminator down a narrow cylinder punched into the ice lining the tunnel, about the width of my forearm and deep beyond the strength of the lamp he carried to pick out the end.
‘They’ve been here,’ I murmured. The only possible explanation was a stray gauss flayer shot striking the tunnel wall. I looked about us, finding several more of the sinister indentations.
‘Then who were they shooting at?’ Jurgen asked. That was a good question. If the orks had made it this far into the tunnels our job was about to get a great deal more complicated. I moved up to join Welard and the point man, who were staring in perplexity at a small mound of metal objects embedded in ice, ominously streaked with red.
‘What do you think these are, sir?’ he asked, the air of unassailable confidence taking a dent for the first time since I’d met him. I looked at the assemblage of tubes and wires for a moment, then the bile rose into my throat as I realised what I was looking at.
‘They’re augmetics,’ I said, swallowing heavily. ‘They’ve been ripped out of someone.’ So that was where Ernulph had disappeared to. These might not be his remains, of course, but it was carrots to credits he’d led whatever foolhardy expedition this pathetic revenant had been a part of. I wondered vaguely if we’d find traces of any other victims, or if they’d all simply been vaporised.
One thing was certain, though. Thanks to these idiots the necrons would know there were humans on Simia Orichalcae now, and were most likely waiting in ambush ahead of us. This was just getting better and better.
Well, there was no point in standing around worrying about it, time was most definitely of the essence here, so I got everyone moving again and dropped back to walk beside Jurgen.
‘Be ready,’ I warned him, ‘things could be about to get–’
I was interrupted by the dying shriek of our point man as he flared and dwindled to nothing in the necrotic glow of one of those hellish gauss weapons, and then the metallic warriors whose appearance I’d so dreaded were upon us.
‘Place your shots,’ Welard said calmly, and the surviving storm troopers unleashed a hail of hellgun fire against our attackers. The glare of the lasbolts impacting on the leading necron dazzled my eyes, then its chest gave way, seared and blasted by the precision volley, and it tumbled to the ice-slick floor revealing a fresh target behind it, already levelling another gauss flayer.
Credit where it’s due, Welard and his men certainly knew their stuff. As I’ve mentioned before, the ambull tunnels were narrow, forcing the hideous automata to come at us almost in single file. But the storm troopers’ discipline was excellent, and with the death of our first casualty they’d dropped into a practiced routine, the men at the front falling prone, those behind kneeling, and the ones at the rear standing up so that the whole squad was able to concentrate their fire as one. The second necron lost its head, quite literally, and fell heavily across the first with a sound not unlike someone kicking a bin full of scrap metal. As I watched it fall I realised, with a thrill of horror, that the first metallic warrior we’d all thought destroyed was rising slowly to its feet again.
‘Jurgen,’ I called, and my aide stepped forward levelling the melta. The storm troopers slipped easily out of his way, keeping up a barrage of hellgun fire to cover him while he aimed, and shielding their eyes as he squeezed the trigger.
The flare of actinic energy stabbed my retina, even through my closed eyelids, and the roar of ice flashing instantly into steam echoed all around us. The air against my face was suddenly warm and wet, as though I’d been teleported into a rain-forest somewhere. As I blinked my vision clear I could see nothing but puddles of molten metal surrounded by grotesque lumps of statuary, some of which still twitched, freezing almost at once into the rapidly-reforming ice. Then, in an instant, they faded away as though they’d never been, leaving behind nothing but drifting vapour and some oddly-shaped indentations in the tunnel floor.
‘Clear,’ Hastur called, taking the place of the disintegrated point man, and leading us on into the darkness. Welard nodded at Jurgen, an almost imperceptible tilt of the head as he passed my aide, the closest I suppose he could come to expressing thanks to an outsider, and jogged along in the wake of his men. I couldn’t help contrasting the reaction of Grifen’s team to the loss of Lunt with the storm troopers’ matter-of-fact dismissal of the loss of one of their own, and mentioned as much to the sergeant.
‘The mission comes first,’ he said, his face hard, and that’s all he would say on the subject. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for idle conversation either, so I let it drop, and resumed straining my ears for the slightest sound which might indicate the approach of more of those monstrous guardians.
Luck or the Emperor must have been with us, though, as all too soon I beheld the baleful glow which forewarned us that we were about to reach our goal. We flattened ourselves against the ice-covered bedrock of the tunnel wall as we approached the entrance to that mighty cavern, through which I’d escaped only a few hours before, and strained our senses for any sign that we had been discovered.
All seemed quiet, except for that damnable humming and the artillery barrage pounding of my heart, so we crept out into the chamber I had so fervently hoped never to see again. My scalp crawled with apprehension, and I had to exert every micron of self-control I possessed to appear calm in front of Welard and his men. They kept their weapons trained on every patch of cover, every green-tinged shadow in the lee of those towering and incomprehensible mechanisms. If they were at all disconcerted by the sheer sense of wrongness surrounding them they gave no sign of it.
‘Which way?’ the sergeant asked, and I indicated the direction of the portal. He nodded. ‘Move out.’
We scurried through that vast space as Jurgen and I had mere hours before, still sticking to the shadows of the towering machines, that ghastly charnel light bathing everything in a sheen of putrescence. Some of them were marked with the peculiar stick and circle hieroglyphics I’d seen on Interitus Prime, and you can be sure the memories the sight of them stirred up did little to calm my fears. By this time my nerves were stretched tighter than harp strings, and it was probably this sense of heightened paranoia which let me hear an almost inaudible sound, a faint scraping which reminded me of scuttling vermin. I signalled the sergeant.
‘Five metres, two o’clock. Behind that... Whatever the hell it is.’ Welard nodded, and gestured a couple of troopers to flank the gleaming tangle of green-glowing pipes. The rest of us closed up, ready to face whatever the threat was, and I drew my laspistol and chainsword. Not that I expected the latter to be much good against metal rather than flesh, but it had served me well on many occasions before now, and the weight of it felt comforting in my hand.
‘Contact. No threat,’ said one of the storm troopers, his voice slightly attenuated in my comm-bead, and fell silent again. I hurried forward to join them, cursing their taciturnity.
‘Explain,’ I said, equally terse, and afraid of transmitting for long enough to be triangulated on. If the trooper was surprised he gave no sign of it.
‘It’s a cogboy,’ he explained flatly.
Not just any cogboy, of course, the Emperor has more of a sense of humour than that. Even before I joined them I had a sense of foreboding, which was amply justified as I looked down at the quivering bundle trying to wedge itself under the largest pipe.
‘Logash,’ I said. The young tech-priest must have recognised my voice, because he turned and looked up at me. Though his metal eyes made any expression hard to read, a sense of recognition began to surface through the expression of stark terror suffusing his face.
‘Commissar Cain?’ His voice trembled, wavering in pitch like a boy in early adolescence. If he wasn’t bonkers before, I thought, he certainly was now. ‘You were right, you were right. We were unworthy to trespass on the sacred mysteries of the Omnissiah–’
‘Where are the others?’ I interrupted, squatting down to his level, and keeping my voice calm. I haven’t had that much experience with madmen, give or take the odd Chaos cultist, but I’ve seen enough cases of combat fatigue and his symptoms seemed similar; overwhelmed by the horrors he’d witnessed he’d simply retreated inside himself. ‘Where’s Magos Ernulph?’
‘Dead,’ he moaned, his blank eyes roving aimlessly, ‘struck down by the guardians for our hubris. We should have listened to you, we should have listened...’
Resisting the temptation to say ‘told you so,’ albeit with some difficulty, I raised him to his feet as gently as I could manage. (Which wasn’t very, to be honest, he was all but catatonic, but I succeeded in the end.)
‘You’re bringing him with us?’ Welard asked, in tones which left me in no doubt what he thought of that idea. I nodded.
‘We can’t just leave him here,’ I said. The sergeant looked dubious, and for a moment I wavered, thinking our mission here was hanging by a thread as it was, and adding a babbling lunatic to our number wasn’t likely to help any. Then again, Logash had been down here longer than any of us, and might have information which could save our lives, or at least help us blow up the portal. As so often in my life it was an almost impossible decision to make, and one which no one else could, but that’s why I get to wear the fancy cap. I pulled on the tech-priest’s arm, reminded of Grifen’s attempt to snap Magot out of her stupor not far from this very spot. ‘We have to go,’ I said. To my relief Logash nodded, and fell into step beside Jurgen and myself.
‘I take it Ernulph asked you to guide him down here?’ I asked, and the tech-priest nodded.
‘I remembered the way. The Omnissiah guided–’
‘Yes, quite,’ I interrupted. ‘Then what happened?’ His face twisted.
‘We entered the temple, and the guardians fell upon us. Some were cut down where they stood, in the very act of making obeisance to the machine god, while others fled. But the guardians pursued them without mercy.’ That explained the remains we’d found in the tunnel anyway, a few of them must have made it that far out of here before they were cornered. Logash turned a pinched, anguished face to me. ‘They were swift and terrible,’ he whispered, ‘and shrouded in horror.’
Well that sounded pretty much like every form of necron I’d ever encountered, and I dismissed his words as a figure of speech at the time, although I was soon to discover how right he was.
‘Contact,’ Hastur said, and opened fire. The other storm troopers followed suit, and I dived for cover, dragging Logash into the shadows with me. A moment later an acrid odour of unwashed socks indicated that Jurgen had joined us.
I levelled my laspistol, seeking a target, and was gratified to see that the storm troopers were doing sterling work in engaging the advancing party of metallic warriors. They were the skin-hunters we’d seen before, or identical copies of them, advancing with terrifying speed, their long blades whispering through the air as they swept back and forth. Instead of ork hides, though, the leading ranks were swathed in human skins, still wet and leaking, thin runnels of blood turned black by the corpse-light, which illuminated everything here, veining the metal torsos beneath. As I tracked the leading one, placing a las bolt squarely in the centre of its forehead, I realised with a shudder that the obscene covering it wore still had the vestige of a face; a face, moreover, which I recognised.
‘Ernulph!’ I whispered, revulsion twisting my stomach, as the creature inside his skin staggered backwards. I made sure of it with a flurry of follow-up shots, then turned my attention to the monstrosity behind it. The magos had been a pompous fool, it was true, but no one deserved a fate like that.
‘They’re behind us!’ Hastur warned, before his voice rose in a throat-rending scream. I turned just in time to see him borne down by one of the razor-wielding automata, eviscerated in seconds, his blood left streaming down the sides of the bulky metal cabinet from behind which, a heartbeat before, he had been pouring hellgun fire into the main body of our vile assailants. A moment later the flayed one rose from a crouch, the still wet skin of the deceased storm trooper clinging to its metal torso by the stickiness of its own blood.
‘Frak this!’ I shouted. ‘Jurgen!’ On cue my aide unleashed another blast from his melta into the centre of the group, cutting a swathe through them as efficiently as before. Once again the necrons caught by the full force of the blast were simply annihilated, flashing into vapour as thoroughly as the victims of their own terrible weapons, while the ones at the fringe of that ravening burst of energy staggered, limbs and torsos seared and softened like candle wax. For a moment I expected them to rally, restoring themselves in that unnerving fashion I’d seen before, but the survivors simply vanished into thin air. For some reason Hastur’s body went with them, but why they would want it was a mystery I was sure I would never want to know the answer to[70].
‘How far to the objective?’ Welard asked, as the surviving storm troopers regrouped. Beyond a single glance at the coating of blood on the metal surfaces marking the spot where Hastur had died he seemed utterly unperturbed by the terrible fate which had befallen his comrade, and the rest seemed equally focussed on the outcome of our mission, scanning the halls around us for any sign of renewed necron activity. I was grateful for their vigilance, but I was beginning to find their complete lack of emotion somewhat unnerving.
‘About three hundred metres,’ I said, forcing my mind back to the issue at hand. Welard nodded, and waved to his remaining squad mates to move out. Jurgen and I fell in behind them as before, although I was now acutely aware that an attack could come from any direction, and you can be sure that I scanned our surroundings with even more diligence than before. I got Logash moving again with a relatively light tug on the arm, and he trotted along with us, apparently perfectly happy to follow whatever orders I gave now I’d been proven to be right about the inadvisability of being here in the first place.
